Art and culture are nonetheless vital, essential even, to what it means to be human, yet digital abundance has diminished our sense of their worth.

The point is, there's this new sense of skepticism and questioning toward tech, even if it is pretty inchoate. What I hope the book helps to do is help people clarify what is amiss, by presenting a critique that is grounded in economics.

Again, it does seem like frustration is mounting in interesting ways, but I'm not sure there will be some dramatic tipping point. Then again, looking back on the history of television, you never know. People had to fight and articulate the politics and the rationale for different funding mechanisms. That was a long and drawn-out battle fought in different countries; it's not like BBC and the CBC in Canada just magically appeared out of the ether. People had to organize for it. I'm always willing to be surprised.

One thing that struck me about going to those tech conferences was all the enthusiasm for free culture, and remixing, and social media, but people's greatest ambition was to be sponsored by Chipotle or something equivalent to that. It was this weird mix of collaborative, utopian claims and this total acquiescence to commercial imperatives.

New media companies look remarkably like the old ones they aspire to replace: male, pale, and privileged.

It's very complicated. There's been this broader mechanism, an industry, which wants people to use free services, from the old days of advertising-supported papers and magazines, to ad-supported free television.

First we need to rethink the terms and recognize that we've imported this language from the technocratic class, from Silicon Valley, that talks about openness and transparency.